Much like the explorers who hacked, climbed and rowed their way through what was a wilderness just 300 to 400 years ago, a business entering the online market has a similar challenge to contend with. You don’t know what’s around the corner, if this river turns into a waterfall, who’s tribal territory you may be infringing on, or maybe what berries you can even eat! And so what did the explorers throughout history do? They hired guides who knew the terrain, who spoke the native languages, who could point out which berries to eat and which rivers to ride. This in effect parodies the post-service commodity, because these guides and their explorer counterparts needed trust and long term compatibility their transactions were often more than service based; they were relationship based.

So if a business is looking to strike it rich in the new world that is the internet, I think it’s important to see that the strategy for engagement and exploration in this jungle incorporates a relationship similar to the explorer model above. Online marketing, e-commerce, and your other web activities as a business are an ongoing exploration. The internet, much like a real jungle, is constantly growing and changing. It’s full of predators. There are fruits to be plucked and ones to avoid, paths to follow and ones to pass over, and while a lot can be learned from going in alone, those lessons can be expensive. Relationships between a business and someone whom they trust to help them navigate this realm are becoming the new online commodity.

This is why I think it’s important that we as businesses view this part of our operations in a long term context. We can’t just build a website, plug in some e-commerce tools and dust off our pants, content with a job well done. Because if this is a company’s approach to online presence and growth they quickly find that the vines and ferns cover them over as the forest canopy grows higher. We should recognize that the online world around us is always adapting, becoming more dense and colourful, with braiding rivers changing their course and leaves falling to the forest floor to decompose into the soil- like so many great website and app ideas whose concepts might have blossomed if only their programming or user interface matched their creators enthusiasm.  Businesses, unable to keep up with the pace of growth and change, also break from their branch and float to the floor in the constant birth, death and regeneration of creative potential and practical products we find online.

But they don’t have to.  A relationship with someone who understands the jungle and why you’re in it is a crucial part of any business operating online.

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The misconception that custom software and eCommerce platforms are something only large companies can afforded is slowly evaporating as software as a service solutions for small and mid sized companies become more widely used. Though proprietary software from major corporations still makes up a huge territory in this ocean of software development, many innovative new companies have caught the wave of agile development over the past several years, and have utilized this new philosophy and approach with much success. Agile development is collaborative, employing ideas or problem solving from cross-functional teams who are able to create a more well rounded and intuitive perspective on the product they’re creating.  As opposed to the kind of programming that happened in silos, one big chunk at a time, it’s a far more flexible and quick approach to developing software. Thirdi has been on the crest of that wave since our inception, it’s a fun wave to ride.

As eCommerce continues to grow, in double digits, small businesses and medium sized businesses can’t afford to ignore its market potential. It’s important to remember that there is an eCommerce platform for every budget.

For questions on how to grow your business online contact the team at Thirdi.

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Take John for example. John runs a second hand store specializing in , instruments, sporting goods, game consoles, cameras etc. He has a lot of stock so he starts posting these items on EBay. Increasingly, he finds that people are contacting him to ship some of these things across Canada or abroad through that platform. The market potential of 30,000,000 other Canadian or 300,000,000 American consumers means his potential for sales has gone from the local maximum of say 2,000,000 to an astounding 330,000,000. Of course, his market share of that potential will only be fractions but a fraction of two million is far less than a fraction of three-hundred and thirty million. Let’s say 1% of people potentially want something John is selling. And John, wanting as much control over his business as possible, starts maximizing the ecommerce potential of this own website- EBay doesn’t take a cut anymore, the middleman is eliminated. He is selling direct to a vastly larger market now.

1% of his immediate geographical market (a city or region of about 2 million residents) is 20,000 people  1% of his national market (Canada) is 300,000 people, and 1% of John’s U.S. and Canadian Market (which thanks to progressive trade laws is relatively harmonized) stands at 3,300,000 people. That’s just 1% of the population looking for the products he offers. If we consider the online component of his business could reach a global population then his potential 1% market is 60 million customers. Even a fraction of that, let’s say .5% of the population equals his potential market size (1 out of every 200 people), this means 30 million customers could potentially want one of the items he is selling. John has gone from 1% of his local market population = 20,000 potential sales to .5% of a global population = 30,000,000 potential sales.

The importance of having an online component to your company, no matter what it might be, CAN’T be under-emphasized.  John’s example might be elementary, very simplified and idealized, but it demonstrates how anyone not engaging potential customers online  denies themselves the opportunity to reach exponentially more consumers and thus increase their income dramatically. It doesn’t take vast amounts of capital and labor, it doesn’t take years and years of strategy and patience. It takes a relationship with a service provider who understands the online marketplace, and who can help you create the ecommerce solutions that you need to reach your potential.

There is value in every corner and crack of your company. Products, services, information, even opinion, are commodities with value. Look at your business, look at what you offer and what you can offer online. If you aren’t offering something online, you should be.

For more information about ecommerce and how it can help your company reach its potential contact Thirdi.

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Online marketing

Let’s continue with the fishing analogy. Just like in fishing you might drop the line down into a school of fish, but if you don’t have the right bait they won’t go for it. Conversely, if you drop the right bait down for the kind of fish you want but it’s nowhere near enough to them you won’t catch anything either…maybe a boot. And just like you can feel nibbles on your line, clicks act in the same way. It may seem like a lot of people are seeing your ad, but nibbles don’t catch fish, and clicks don’t mean you’ve made customers. So how do we interpret click statistics and consumer behavior online?

If a lot of traffic is coming through your site via an ad then you know that it’s doing its job as far as getting eyes on your site. However, we have to look deeper than that. These numbers tell us a lot, but they don’t tell the whole story. When you buy ad space from another site make sure you are able to get the analytics too. Find out how long people are looking at the ad if it’s a pop up- if it’s one second it usually counts as a click to your ad space provider even if users closed the pop up right away. As far as the provider is concerned, someone saw your ad and that’s the name of the game.

Quality clicks are what you are looking for unless you just want to generate blind, rapid site traffic. Many sites do this, and generate impressive ad revenue from it. But if you own an actual product or service and want to connect with a consumer base you need more than ads, you need content. Potential customers need to be engaged. Attention spans have shrunk and we don’t notice traditional ad media anymore- not to the extent that we used to. Even banner click through rates have been declining. Being able to advertise without people knowing that they’re being advertised to is the trick today. Some may find this underhanded, but in the marketing biz it’s seen more as subtlety. Social media has created new terms of engagement that have helped consumers and companies connect in a more fluid and continuous manner, sticking has begun to replace clicking. This is really where understanding consumer behavior online happens, in the dialogue played out in words and actions online. But for a small business it’s hard to imagine the kind of social media presence that a major company with a large consumer base enjoys (or is conversely beholden too as Forrester researchers often stress) There are some basic and simple things that you can do though, to better understand how your web marketing is working.

Find out who is looking at your ads and who is looking at your site, not individual names and addresses and such, but where they are, how long they are staying, where they are going on your site, what they may be looking for if you can discern it. “How are these people behaving?” is the key question, not “how much are they clicking?” .

If you are able to understand these and other things you’ll see that the water is in fact clear, and not deep and dark as it may have looked before. And you’ll know where to put your line and what to put on it a whole lot easier than when you were when fishing in the dark.

Thirdi

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A couple weeks ago, the cyber-security whiz-kids at McAfee released their very seasonally-titled article “The 12 Scams of Christmas”. It details a number of ways (twelve in all, I’m pretty sure) that all those bad Santas out there use the good cheer of the holiday season to scam people online. And, given the increasing amounts of money spent online at this time of year on eCommerce and charitable giving, it’s inevitable that a lot of scammers will make a lot of money using tricks like these:

• Charitable Phishing Scams – Phishers send emails pretending to be from the various charities that are especially active during the holiday season. Feeling generous, you follow a link in the email to donate cash, and the phishers take your money and spend it on things other than hospitals in the third world.
• Fake “Luxury” Jewelery – They warn that a lot of those spam emails advertising Rolex watches for fifty bucks are actually scams. Surprising, I know.
• Auction Site Fraud – McAfee warns that a lot of fake auction sites are set up in the weeks preceding Christmas. They recommend you use a known site like eBay. Though, as you’re about to read, using eBay doesn’t exactly protect you 100% either.

So yeah, watch out for that stuff. But of course, there’s plenty of other stuff to worry about at this time of year too. Apparently data and identity theft enjoys its own Christmas rush too. As online shoppers increasingly turn to eCommerce, they become increasingly exposed to unscrupulous vendors and advertisers looking to pilfer their credit card details, and any other info they can get their hands on.

Now, all these warnings always raise a question for me – do any of these scams actually work? Are the scammers actually able to make more money doing this stuff than by, say, getting a job? Well, have you heard about “The Man”? He’s an English con-man who headed an international syndicate dedicated to selling counterfeit goods on eBay. He was just caught, and as the authorities unravelled his enterprise, they learned that the made enough money to buy 10 luxury houses in Thailand, a restaurant in Australia, and part equity in a multi-million dollar yacht. And what were the goods he was counterfeiting? Golf clubs. He’d have the clubs made in China at a couple bucks a pop, then slap a fake Taylor-Made or Calloway logo on them, and sell them online for more than a hundred bucks each. And he made millions.

So the lesson here is, don’t believe anthing anyone tells you online ever, don’t buy a Rolex off a link you received in a spam email, and don’t let your dad look too closely at that new 9-iron you bought him for Christmas.

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TweetBookz – Tweets, by design, are meant to be ephemeral and short-lived. You see a funny picture, think up a witty pun, or have an interesting bowel movement, and you tap out a quick 140 character post about it. It gets sent out to your friends and associates and is quickly read and forgotten. Or so we all thought. But TweetBookz take this uniquely online world and give it a permanent, paper-y presence on your coffee table. Or, more likely, in a dusty box in your attic. The idea is simple: you pick 200 of your very best tweets and this company turns them into a book, with one tweet per page. For the sake of veracity, you’re not allowed to go in and edit your tweets after the fact to make them more awesome. And you’re also not allowed to borrow any from some funnier, smarter or sexier Twitter user. It’s gotta be all you. So if I were to create a TweetBook myself, it would consist of 200 identical pages, each saying: “Got up, did some writing, watched reruns of The Office. Tty tomorrow!”  They cost around $25.50 for the hard-cover edition. And you have to go hard-cover, because this will be something you’ll want to read and re-read for decades to come.

Amazon’s Instant Video Streaming with DVD Purchase – What’s the crappiest part of buying  a DVD from an online retailer, instead of down at Best Buy? That’s right, it’s the infernal waiting for it to arrive in the mail. Well, the wait is over. Now when you purchase certain hard-copy DVDs from Amazon, you get instant access to a streaming version of the movie. It’s only available to US purchasers at the moment, and only for about 300 TV shows and movies. And, for now, it’s only for a limited time. But if it’s popular, you’d have to think they’ll roll this feature out on a much bigger level. The best thing about this is that you can buy DVDs as gifts for people, and still get to watch it yourself via the streaming version.

VeriFone’s iPhone Credit Card Payment System – So you’re selling some vintage Scobby Doo collectibles to a guy who saw your Craigslist ad. You meet him (somewhere public and well-lit, I hope) and he doesn’t have any cash. No problem. Just swipe his credit card through this little iPhone gizmo, and his money will instantly be yours to enjoy. It brings the joy and convience of ecommerce to the brick and mortar world of, well, wherever you happen to be. To operate this, you have to pay a monthly subscription fee, so it’s really only meant for relatively high-volume sellers, like delivery pizza parlors, door-to-door salespersons and prostitutes. But if there’s anyone like that on your holiday shopping list, you know what to buy them.

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The first point in the Cluetrain Manifesto encompasses all of the others. It is so important you should read it over and over again until it truly sinks in.

Markets Are Conversations

Note that it doesn’t say “markets will become conversations” or “markets should be conversations”. They always were, and always will be. Whether it is in the form of an Indian bazaar or an Amazon web server, every transaction is a conversation between buyer and seller. Mass Media has served to obscure this fact over the last few hundred years, but consumers have always found ways to coordinate themselves. Whether it is with the Better Business Bureau, or coworkers at the water-cooler, customers will always try and coordinate themselves to make decisions in a market.

The Cluetrain Manifesto was written in the time before blogs were called “blogs”, when a Face Book was printed and given to college freshmen, and when Google was an unheard-of research project from Stanford. Today, online markets look far more conversational than they did then. Remember: the dominant model for eCommerce in the ’90s was the catalogue. The catalogue itself was born in a time before the telephone, where transactions had to be completed by mail and products took months to arrive. The catalogue model is useless in a world where communication is dirt cheap and instantaneous.

Today, we are getting closer to a world that accepts the ubiquity (and cheapness) of communication, but we are not there yet. Companies have figured out how to harness some of these new tools to talk more directly with consumers. You can see this in the thousands of brands who maintain active Twitter accounts, or keep honest and open company blogs. You can see this in the live chat feature that you can open up on popular retailer’s websites, or the GetSatisfaction forums that streamline customer service. Corporations have found their voice on the web, but I would argue that consumers are actually further behind.

The modern consumer still does not know how much power they wield in 2009. They have had tastes of it: like when American Airlines created the Airline Passenger’s Bill Of Rights because of a campaign from one irate passenger, or when Facebook had to reverse an unpopular change to their terms of service. It is just hard to understand that this kind of collective action will soon be the norm.

We are only at the beginning of this shift. Doc Searls, one of the authors of the manifesto, has spent the last ten years working on a framework to understand these new empowered consumers. It is called Vendor Relationship Management, and it is worth taking a look at. VRM is the inverse of CRM (Customer Relationship Management). It is how purchasing decisions are made when the balance of power shifts in the customers favour. Instead of companies dividing markets by demographics, or geography, consumers will divide providers based on what they can offer. Don’t like the terms of your cell phone plan? Send out a request for proposals to other cell-phone companies and let them compete for your business.

The key to understanding this new world is that customers are no longer alone. Prior to the Internet, there was no reliable way for an ordinary person to complain to an audience of thousands without going through a gatekeeper. Reporters had to be wooed, editors had to consent, advertisers had to be consulted, before a story could be published to the masses. Now, anyone can access thousands of people through just 2 degrees of separation in their Facebook network. Anyone can be a threat to a brand. That means that everyone has more power.

In this new world of amplified word of mouth, companies must learn to listen better than they have been. Customers can be more of an asset, or a threat, than ever before. What they cannot be is ignored. It is too easy for them to join together, now. The communication is too fast. The organization is too easy. The power is too cheap.

Remember, markets are conversations. Conversations are not monologues. If you can’t give your customers what they are looking for, they will join together and find someone who can.

Check in tomorrow for some interesting software that can help you coordinate this listening. Even better: shoot us an email, or give us a call, and tell us about your market’s communication problems. We certainly know how to listen…and we might just be able to help.

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But now it seems the eCommerce portion of YouTube’s plan to actually make money is finally close to fruition. Google, which owns YouTube, is in talks with TV networks and studios to begin streaming full episodes of TV shows. And, just like iTunes, they plan to charge users for the shows.

Reportedly, YouTube wants to charge $1.99 per episode. It’s much the same business model as that used by both iTunes and Amazon. Though there is a difference. The competitors offer episodes as downloads, while YouTube will only be providing streaming access to the shows.

According to YouTube, they’re confident they’ll be able to arrange some kind of deal amenable to themselves, the TV networks and studios, and end users. YouTube, it would seem, is banking on their strong brand, incredibly high traffic, and the fact that people already come to the site, in droves, in order to watch videos. Whether that’s enough to convince consumers to pay a similar premium for streamed content, versus downloadable media, remains to be seen.

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Ecommerce has truly emerged as an increasingly important engine of consumer spending these past few years, and improvements in shopping cart software, website design, and online marketing through social media and other avenues continues to push ecommerce to the forefront of consumer behavior.

Some believe that the next step will be an integration of social media and TV, but there’s been a counterpoint to that claim (by an un-named source close to this Senses blogger who is developing a social media TV platform- apparently it’s tricky!) I think it’s obvious that it will be tough to do the social TV thing because being social and paying attention to Gossip Girl at the same time can be very difficult, as Gossip Girl can be very intense.  So intense that I am commonly silenced and banished from the living room when it is on. So next Christmas shopping season will you be watching the classic Christmas cartoons and ordering things off e-bay during commercials? Probably not, but as the start to this holiday shopping season has shown, the game is changing. TV will obviously have to adapt, as retailers have now discovered. Social media marketing has been a great success as Black Friday sales attest to, and online sales have risen dramatically this Cyber Monday thanks to the evolution of ecommerce.

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GoEyeball is an online shopping service that saves shoppers time and money by searching for any item as specified by the user based on a price threshold and other particulars. Shoppers make their own eyeballs on the site to find the products they want to keep an eye on, name the price they want to find it at (or a close approximation) and then the eyeball does the rest. Currently the technology is used most on major shopping sites that are compatible with the software but it is being further developed so that the scope and range of the eyeball will increase to include the entire internet; finding you the best price on earth for the product you want.  And you don’t have to do a thing, GoEyeball will e-mail you and alert you instantly when your eye has found the product you want for the price you want. Just in time for the festive season and right in the middle of swine flu season your customized eyeball can do your Christmas shopping for you, everything from kids toys to real estate listings.

I’m pretty stoked that I don’t have to risk  swine flu or debit card fraud on Robson Street now.

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